Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

Love and honesty don’t mix.

I transform fiction into memory.

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

The prayer of a trained theurgist is like the majestic flow of a large river but an ignorant and weak person can produce only something similar to an irregular trickle from a half-clogged tap.

If having an imagination means imagining all the things you don't have - imagining, in fact, the impossibility of your own happiness - is an imagination a good thing?

The finest plans are always ruined by the littleness of those who ought to carry them out, for emperor himself can actually be nothing.

A man who gets divorced is not forever going to be talked about for it. There are very different standards that we have for women than we have for men.

I don't really care where movies come from as long as they're worth making.

Come what may and love it.

I have been very happy with my homes, but homes really are no more than the people who live in them.

History , as it comes into our daily lives, is charged with surprise and shock.

He is rich enough who does not want bread.

Whenever a free man is in chains we are threatened also. Whoever is fighting for liberty is defending America.